It's a great pleasure to be back here in what I always
think of as desert country.
I came here first about, well, at least--
either, but 40 or 50 years ago.
At my age, one becomes a little vague about time.
I used to come down here and camp in the desert
when the flowers were out and listen to the doves at night.
It was a little hard sleeping on the ground,
but it was very beautiful.
I think you need to get a little bit closer.
Think that'll work.
T. S. Eliot once said that the reading of one's own poetry
was a form of indecent exposure and I know what he means.
And another nice--
I like epigraphs, you know?
You don't just get the motor going right away.
I sent some of my poems not long ago to a young lady editor,
one of the various magazines.
And she wrote back and she said that my poems and their content
was not what she had been taught to expect in poetry,
and I hope she was right.
I might say a little bit.
I don't really write poems.
I write light verse.
I aspire no higher.
By light verse, I mean funny poems, satiric poems,
love stuff, even obscene love stuff--
though I won't bore you with any of that--
and that type of thing.
[INAUDIBLE] playing with words.
It's a tradition that has a certain background that goes
back to the Greek Anthology.
It comes up through Catullus, whom I never
could consider anything but a light verse and a poet,
though he was a very great light verse or a poet, perhaps
the greatest, Martial and Juvenal.
They're a number of French and Italian ones and Rochester
and Herrick.
And in modern times, the comic poems of Pound and Eliot.
I'm thinking of the hippopotamus poems, which are really superb.
I use a very peculiar metric, which I think
is in tune with modern times.
It's the typewriter metric.
You set your typewriter for a certain number of characters
and then when you come to that time,
you stop and you're allowed to-- in my system,
you're allowed to break the word with a hyphen
as long as you hyphenate it by Webster.
And the next line then in the couplet
may only be two characters this way or two characters that way.
Now, the virtue of this method is
that you don't have to worry about where
to end your lines because the typewriter tells you.
And you just run your spoken cadence against the machine
and it has some interesting effects
when you read it in the book.
I will read the first poem called
Technical Notes, first Technical Notes, which
explains what I'm up to.
Catullus is my master, and I mix a little acid
in a bit of honey in his bowl.
Love is my subject and the lack of love, which lack is what
makes evil a poet must strike.
Catullus could rub words so hard together.
Their friction burn the heat that
warms us now 2000 years away.
I roll the words around my mouth and count the letters
in each line.
Thus, eye and ear contend inside the poem
and draw its movement tight.
Milton thought rhyme was vulgar.
I agree.
Yet sometimes if it's hidden in the line,
a rhyme will rich in tone.
The thing I most despise is, quote, "poetic," unquote,
diction.
I prefer to build with plain brown bricks of common talk,
American talk, and then set one Roman stone among them
for a key.
I know Catullus knew a poem is like a blow, an impact striking
where you least expect.
This I believe.
And yet with me, a poem is finally just a natural thing.